November 5, 2004 is the earliest that anyone registered on here (Nasty's says Nov 5, 2001, but that's not right lol), but OE has been around longer than that. I think that 2004 was when we first switched to phpBB from whatever we were using before that, and we weren't able to convert the old board. I don't quite remember.

I bought cdretc.com a few years ago and had it redirected to here for old times sake, but it expired and I just never did anything with it after that. I checked a few days ago and it's actually still available lol.I actually have some bits and pieces of the CDRETC era site on my computer that I'll put together and share.

This community comes from a couple other old places. I was a mod on ghost-cdr and clone cd underground then an admin. Met so many great folks. Then there was some..instability at ccdug and a few of us that were close branched off onto our own. I miss some of the old folks that I had become very close with (Sentinel54, freon chill, lot hook, Stretcharmstrong, Analogue 40 of course theres pinky and ripper and so many othersI know their real names but won't use them here lol though it seems silly in this day to use a 'username'. Of course I've made too many friends to name here along the way and though not part of the 'original' admin team, JoeLouie, who is an IRL friend of mine has really stepped up and kept after the place-thanks so much for all you've done. The core group of users here who still visit the site...wow. Thanks! Some folks(Jim comes to mind immediately)have made significant financial contributions to this place, especially when we were poor students/freshly graduated....and of course I love coming back here and seeing posts. I wish there was a way we could make this place more active etc and of course we're always open to suggestions.

I actually got into Computers (outside of using one at work) when the technology was developed that made "burning" you own CDs possible. In my youth I was a bit of a nut in regards to having the music I liked playing. So recording Album cuts onto tape led me to be an early adopter of CDRs. So early, that half the time you made coasters as there was no buffer under run capability on my first LG CD Writer. (I was copying Wave files off my CDs and making greatest hits disks to the amazement of my friend and family. This was just as the Napster craze took off and MP3 became part of the vernacular. ) I went looking for help on the Web and stumbled across all of the sites mentioned => and a lot more who ceased operation long ago.

I never bothered with a Handle, or Username, as most of you know. My name is Jim. At the time I got on the web most folks would never put their real name out there, so I though it was cool and somewhat unique to do it.